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Media Violence vs. Real Violence Essay

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Television is the source of the most broadly shared images and messages in history; it is the mainstream of the common symbolic environment into which children are born and which has a major part to play in our lives. One can argue that media violence contribute towards social violence where the effects place a huge impact in ones being. Television violence is not only a form of media violence; there are other significant forms of media that contribute to media violence which are computer games, comic books and music. In this essay I will compare the theoretical perspectives and methodologies of at least three different approaches to the study of the effects of media violence and how effective they are in establishing a link between …show more content…

violent video games and films the boys were exposed to, the effects of the media would have played huge part in what had happened. Children are easily influenced by the negatives of the media. It was argued that the similarities between the events of child’s play 3 and the murder of James Bulger were effectively non-existent, it was said that Jon Venables might have seen the film which could have corrupted and poisoned his mind leading him to commit such crime. “Young people are ‘saturated’, ‘hooked’ and ‘corrupted’: their impressionable minds are ‘bombarded’ and ‘warped’. The videos themselves are describes an addictive pollutant’: they are ‘evil’, ‘sick’, ‘brutalising’, ‘poisonous’, ‘insidious’, ‘abhorrent’, ‘vile’, ‘muck’. The scale of the problem is enormous – and it must be contained by firm and decisive action”. (Buckingham, D, 1996, p. 25)
This extract taking from Moving Images, describes Child Play content, it also best describes that media violence exerts a powerful damaging influence on young people’s minds and mould them into what the media has portrayed.

Screen violence clearly appeals to popular concerns and is never far from the headlines. Serious news reports become entwined with more speculative accusations about the influence of screen media on children. Children are less developed in establishing right from wrong and their ability to control their emotion. The best way to

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